Foundry technology

The fifteenth entry is a junta fria, the seam left where two streams of metal met and failed to fuse, and English calls it « a cold shut ». The translation is easy; what repays a stop is how unusual it is inside English. Put « cold » in front of a noun and the temperature almost always vanishes. « A cold call » is a telephone call nobody was expecting. « Cold feet » is the loss of nerve that arrives the night before. « The cold shoulder » is deliberate unfriendliness, and it is « given » to somebody. Being « left out in the cold » is exclusion from a group. « Cold comfort » is consolation that fails to console, and « going cold turkey » is stopping something all at once. Six phrases, not one of them about heat, and a learner meeting them one at a time takes each for an accident. « A cold shut » is then the exception that means what it says: the casting failed because the metal genuinely had cooled too far. Portuguese keeps frio on the thermometer and hands those other jobs to other words.